


History Repeats

by thedevilchicken



Category: Fight Club (1999)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-23
Updated: 2010-12-23
Packaged: 2017-10-14 00:01:36
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,229
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/143128
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thedevilchicken/pseuds/thedevilchicken





	History Repeats

**Author's Note:**

  * For [blamography](https://archiveofourown.org/users/blamography/gifts).



Things made sense after.

Things made sense, according to everything that had gone before that Jack had viewed from an angle, walled off from himself because Tyler was himself. He wondered, nights when he couldn’t sleep, nights when Marla snuffled into her pillow (cursed in her sleep, spread out what little existed of her to the size of the old king size bed that they shared on nights when he could no longer argue) , if everything Tyler did would hit him in a flash. He saw only parts of it, hated himself for wanting and needing a kind of psychosocial integration with that man that he’d loved and he’d hated.

There was no flash, after the first and final.

Things made sense because the world didn’t end. It could have, he guessed – if Tyler hadn’t been a subconscious expression of his own conscious desire then it could have because as smart as Tyler Durden had been from start to finish, Jack was smarter. (Of course, that made no sense because Jack was Tyler, and Tyler was Jack.) But the world didn’t end, just faltered for a moment while Marla loitered support groups for things he needed pamphlets to understand and he dreamed when he dreamed about mirrors and a reckless smile that was his but wasn’t at all.

The world didn’t end and got back on its feet. He hated that he’d made it stronger, made it harder, that he was the sharp edge that pared down the law to an instrument of Orwellian nightmare. Or close to it. But he covered his tracks, finished a project that Tyler had started in copy-pasting over the life he could barely recall having lived. Marla helped and he hated her for it. He tossed the dildo from her dresser out the window one night just to spite her. She lectured him on malice,, morality and The System and then fell asleep in her thrift store dress.

He got a job. He wore a tie. The subtle undercurrent of malignant fucking resentment beneath his plastic fantastic smile kept an insipid manager at bay and he tried hard not to resent himself for the fact that Tyler had made everything he wanted seem so very possible. He had a desk in a cubicle, a laptop, a PDA that logged his frequent flyer miles, a framed photograph of Marla where she’d cut her hair so short and uneven that she looked as mentally unbalanced as she more than likely was. He didn’t know if he loved her or hated her. It seemed a lot like both, the two hurtling toward each other like the car crashes he always knew would happen. He just didn’t have sufficient data there to support a timeframe.

Things made sense, because they ran at a pathetic, steady norm. He wouldn’t let himself long for anarchy, though organised anarchy was hardly anarchy at all and he knew it. He wore Band-Aids like the lattice on a hot apple pie over the back of his hand to hide the shiny remnants of Tyler Durden’s kiss. He logged his hours, did his work, registered his acute disdain for authority in internet forums full of angsty teens all angry at their dad and then felt marginally worse instead of better. He ate lunch in the cafeteria overlooking the park. Sometimes he fed the ducks by the pond he couldn’t see from his cubicle.

He supposed it was the park where he saw him first.

The first time it was less than a second, a flash, a flash frame, white-blonde hair and a leather jacket that disappeared before he knew what he’d seen. He shivered, cursed, then took a bite of tuna mayo on rye.

A flash by the bridge. A flash by the hotdog cart as a kid lost hold of a red balloon and then that flash was gone like it had never been. Weeks of flashes, punctuated by Marla’s smart mouth and a crawling feeling just under his skin that might’ve been a grim fucking ghost and might’ve been some kind of fungal infection.

The first week had him so tense his jaw ached right through the non-conversation when Marla told him all about her new character, Ovarian Cancer Girl. She was fitter and more vicious than anyone he knew. The second week he was snappy, pissed off the mailman and the girl in accounts who stopped smiling her pretty smile every time he passed.

Week three, he smashed his keyboard on the edge of his desk and watched the buttons scatter over the floor before he scooped them up. He deposited them in the nearest waste paper basket and requisitioned a new one from the vacant cubicle next door. Week four, his fist met the bathroom mirror. He left the bloody glass in the sink and threw up the remains of Marla’s Mac & Cheese. He was careful about stating cause.

“Tyler.”

His insides scrunched. He didn’t turn around; he plucked the crust from a slice of bread, pulled it to pieces just as methodically as a person can pull apart bread, threw it to the ducks.

“Leave me alone.”

The wood of the bench dipped. He groaned and rubbed his eyes, got the remnants of stale white loaf in them.

“Tyler.”

“I’m not Tyler.”

The chuckle at that was familiar, but the ironic tilt to it was not.

They didn’t talk any more than that, not then. Jack shredded the bread so thoroughly the ducks seemed nonplussed to receive it, then he stood and pointedly did not look him in the eye as he turned to him, awkward in a way he couldn’t explain. He didn’t smile, he didn’t offer an explanation, just paused one second then two then left because what else could he do? They weren’t friends. Acquaintances hardly covered it.

He went back to work. He went home to Marla, who’d let herself in with a key he hadn’t given her but hadn’t taken back. She’d been cooking and that made him wary but when he woke the next morning he conceded that she still didn’t want him dead. With Tyler gone, resigned to the inertia of his life, it seemed sleep came so much easier.

Angel found him the next day, by the coffee shop by the park. He saw him in the glass, a glimpse of the hair that made his stomach lurch sickly before he felt the warm hand against his shoulder. He flinched; Angel gave that same ironic chuckle.

“Skip work,” he said, simply. “Come with me.”

Jack’s look said ‘incredulous’ but for a moment he almost said yes. He had no earthly idea why he would.

As it turned out, three days later he did.

He told himself this was scientific method. He’d see how his brain reacted to proximity to an agitator. He’d see if those flashes came, if the antagonism brought out that jarring integration he’d longed for since that night. So he let Angel talk to him at lunch, let him call him on the phone. He let him meet him after work and take him where he wanted to go and, fuck, it was the basement. That basement. The place he’d done what he’d done to that pretty face. There was no flash when he entered the room. It just made him sick.

When Angel kissed him, he didn’t try to stop it – he was too goddamn surprised. He stood rooted in place, frozen there while Angel’s warm hands cupped his face, while he sucked lightly on his bottom lip then pulled back, an oddly expectant look in his eyes. There was no telling how he should have reacted but Angel didn’t seem to think stationary shock was it, and told him so.

They came back the next day. Jack was on lunch and he figured he’d be back on time, almost was in the end. They sat cross-legged on the ground and Angel talked; Jack had barely been aware that he spoke at all before that, and couldn’t bring himself to give much of a response. He looked around instead, crates littering the space with which he’d been so intimately acquainted not so very long ago in the scheme of things, broken glass by the high little windows from the latest break-in. The stench of stagnant liquor hung in the air, and something metallic and rotten clung beneath it in a way that would never, ever fade away.

Angel kissed him again. This time he didn’t resist. This time, he didn’t freeze. He tangled his fingers in Angel’s platinum hair and kissed him back.

There were no flashes, but the moment did seem oddly electric.

Six days later, days of sneaking into the now-closed bar to sneak into the boarded-up basement that they knew was taking a chance. Days of Angel goading him into kisses as he talked about everything and nothing in that irritatingly placid tone that grated and grated and grated on his very last nerve. Six days later, Jack finally pushed Angel down on the ground, straddled him, kissed him, yanked down his jeans and fucked him there on the concrete floor, just to shut him up. It fucked up his knees, bloody grazes from the friction that he didn’t bother to explain to Marla because she didn’t ask. It fucked up Angel’s jaw where it rubbed on the ground, fucked up the palms of his hands that meant Jack walked back to work after it all with dried red smears at his hips. He didn’t care. The thought made him smile, until he remembered not to.

Jack shoved him up against the wall the next day, bit the back of his neck as he came inside him. He took him over a fucked-up old table the next, Angel’s breath catching in a way that caught on his nerves and made him take him just that much harder. He wondered if it’d been like this with Tyler. The things Angel said, it was clear Tyler had had him; Angel wore that like a badge of honour, like fucking Tyler Durden was the greatest achievement of his life and maybe it was, for all Jack knew. He never talked about work, never talked about his family, just about the world that Tyler tried to make for them. As they fucked, as they talked, Jack just felt sorry for him.

Angel got down on his knees, sucked him off while Jack tried not to recall bone breaking under his fists, sharp cheekbones cracking and caving, skin, fat, tissue all spreading for his hands with just a little blood for lubrication. He’d hated himself for it. Angel’s face wasn’t nearly so pretty after that, even when the swelling went down.

Marla never asked why sex with them became such a rarity, just accepted it with the same awkward momentary gripe then sudden resignation that she’d taken everything for the past few months. He didn’t volunteer the fact that Angel was the reason, even when he brought him home with him, when they shared silent beers in the new condo where Marla visited when the fancy struck. They never went to bed; Angel rode him on the couch while Jack pretended to watch TV, Angel jacked him at the dining table while he tried to work and told him that he missed the old Tyler, the Tyler who’d been so alive.

For the first time, he didn’t bother to correct the name. He was Tyler Durden, just not the one that Angel ever knew.

They went back to the basement one night, drove by Paper Street in a fit of idiocy since for all he knew the Feds were just chomping at the bit to take him in. They stood in the half light of two crossed flashlights and Angel begged him to hit him; Jack – Tyler – shook his head. They couldn’t keep this up; Tyler – Jack – told him so.

Angel shrugged. “I guess I figured fucking me up meant something,” he said. “I guess I figured it still might.”

Jack shook his head. “It meant I wanted to kill you,” he said. “I was almost there.”

Angel smiled, and for a moment he almost looked like himself again. He almost looked like Tyler Durden had never existed.

“You should’ve done it.”

“I don’t want to. Not anymore.”

It was a revelation, news to him. He hated Angel, certainly didn’t love him, had never wished him well even when he wasn’t wishing him dead. But he supposed now it made sense; now Tyler was gone, now Tyler was him, there was no jealousy. There was no need. Even if he missed the ache of the fighting, adrenaline, the thread of pain that made him realise that modern life was all veneer, he didn’t wish Tyler back and didn’t wish Angel Face dead.

“Hey, I’ve never even known your name.”

Angel smiled, wry and cheerless. “Tyler knew it,” he said, and shambled closer. He tucked his fingertips into Tyler’s jeans, because they were honestly Tyler’s jeans, and rested his forehead on his shoulder for a moment.

“Jack,” he said, murmured, a whisper. “It’s Jack.”

A twist in his stomach and the flashes came, sudden, complete and deafening. Things made sense, after. He kissed him softly as it all fell apart.

Tyler kissed Jack’s angel face and laughed, and cried.


End file.
